5 Factors in Spite of Which We Still Love ‘Saved by the Bell’

I love the show and have watched it from beginning to end several times. It’s light-hearted and innocent, and much like Full House, it focuses on a lot of good messages such as ‘drugs are bad’, ‘studying is good’ and so on.

While I adore the TV show, I do have to point out a few things that popped into my head during a recent marathon.

1. How many classrooms does a high school hold?

The amount of places where they spend their time seems to be extremely limited. They’re always either at The Max or in the hallways with the all the lockers that’s conveniently placed between the principal’s office and one of the two (maybe three) classrooms that they seem to have ALL of their classes in. It must be a very tiny school seeing as how they don’t travel very far, ever.

2. The group resembles that of every college brochure – a little bit of everything.

Let’s explore the dynamic between our main characters here. In what universe would a group of people consisting of a fashion oriented airhead, a neurotic nag, the classically prettiest girl in school, enormous geek, cute preppy troublemaker, and muscular jock who can also dance, ever be friends? This isn’t Breakfast Club where they bond over similarities during the course of one Saturday detention. We’re talking 6 seasons here.

Naturally Kelly is a cheerleader. Even Lisa fits the profile. Jessy being an active feminist and all doesn’t fit the profile, sorry. Plus what cheerleading squad consists of two or three people entirely? Where are the rest of them? How are you going to build a pyramid? Or perhaps their cheers only go as far as spelling encouraging messages at The Max… And who has that much time to hang out at the diner in between classes in high school anyway? It’s always light out when they’re there. School’s in session guys! I’m not buying it!

It’s no wonder that towards the middle of the last season they’ve reached times where they simply didn’t have the material to make an episode out of. So what do they do? You guessed it – Montage. Perhaps it wasn’t quite the montage in its true form of a compilation of scenes with music in the background, but more so going back in time and playing a bunch of segments one after another. They did that which every sitcom ends up doing at one point or another. They sat them down at a table and got them to go down the memory lane, reminiscing about the good times. They even craftily snuck in otherwise unusable footage in there.

5. You know the show has come to an end when things stop making sense.

Season 5 comes around. Jessy is freaking out about the college she desperately wants to get into. Zack is worried he’s gonna have to go to summer school. Lisa’s future holds a fashion institute. Slater’s going to college instead of the army. Speeches are made, tears re shed. All of a sudden, it’s season 6 and here they all are again, back in school. All except Jessy and Kelly, the nonexistence of which no one seems to acknowledge. They just throw a new hot girl at you, Tori which inevitably becomes Zach’s new love interest; and put Belding in a wig and hope that you don’t notice anything different. The question at hand is still what the hell are they doing back there? It can’t be summer school… But at this point you’re far too invested and you can’t just write the show off… So you end up ignoring the indescrepencies and just rolling with it.